70 Books & arts The EconomistAugust 3rd 2019
W
hen sheis not holding a basketball,
Lucy Adler is gangly, self-conscious
and invisible; she is a “pizza bagel” (a Jew-
ish-Italian “mutt-girl”) with few friends.
But on the court she is a “Warrior Goddess
of Mannahatta”, schooling geezers who
mistake her for an easy mark. Lucy knows
she must play it cool at first, as men get an-
gry when a girl makes them look bad. But
when she assumes her full powers, she is
triumphant. She loves the sound of a ball
going through a hoop:Thwip. Perfection,
the chain-link net jangling “just quietly
enough to sound like someone counting
rosary beads”.
Novels about female athletes are rare.
“The Falconer”, a debut from Dana Czap-
nik, a veteran sports journalist, is a correc-
tive. The moments when Lucy, the book’s
narrator, is shooting hoops offer some of
the liveliest sports writing in fiction. Yet
the real joy of this coming-of-age story de-
rives from inhabiting such a nuanced 17-
year-old, who vividly captures the hubris
and insecurity of youth.
For all her vulnerability, Lucy has the
shrewdness of a native New Yorker who at-
tends an elite private school, plays pick-up
games on city courts and smokes pot on
rooftops. This is the still-gritty early 1990s,
and she roams the streets with the curios-
ity of a photographer. (The book is also a
love-letter to the dynamism of New York,
which sometimes seems like “an orchestra
in a constant state of warming up”.) Lucy
wants to know how to avoid the traps of
convention—“Is there anything more trag-
ic than being boring?”—but is dismissive of
advice, particularly from well-meaning
adults. She loves the way her body is per-
fectly calibrated to basketball, but worries
that the guy she likes will never care for her
small breasts and frizzy hair. She envies the
way boys unapologetically take up space,
but she doesn’t want to be a boy; just a girl
who has more fun.
Lucy’s precocity is occasionally implau-
sible. Few teenagers—even terribly clever
ones—are ever likely to compare a Septem-
ber night to “the burnt edge of a saxophone
solo” in a Tennessee Williams play. The in-
sightful dialogue often sounds like wishful
thinking. But these are forgivable flaws.
“The Falconer” is a winning tale about the
often-painful alchemy of adolescence,
which transforms the misadventures of
youth into something like wisdom. 7Sporting fictionHoop dreams
The Falconer. By Dana Czapnik. Atria
Books; 288 pages; $25. Faber & Faber; £8.99D
uring thesecond world war, Ameri-
can troops in the Far East were said to
have two foes. The first was Japanese. One
propaganda poster depicted an enemy’s sa-
bre, slick with blood. The second adversary
had no sword but was terrifying all the
same. Malaria-carrying mosquitoes infect-
ed around 60% of Americans stationed in
the Pacific at least once. Drugs such as Ata-
brine could help, but nasty side-effects
meant that some gis shunned their daily
dose—with predictable consequences.
“These Men Didn’t Take Their Atabrine”
warned a sign propped below a pair of hu-
man skulls in Papua New Guinea.
At least decent treatment was available.
For most of human existence, says Timothy
Winegard in his lively history of mosqui-
toes, “we did not stand a chance” against
the insect and its diseases. That was partly
because of ignorance. Earlier humans
blamed malaria and its mosquito-borne
cousins on “bad air” from swamps, even as
the years passed and death kept whining at
their ears. Malaria once killed over 20% of
people in the Fens of eastern England. Yel-
low fever ravaged Memphis, Tennessee,
deep into the 1800s. No wonder Mr Wine-
gard calls the mosquito a “destroyer of
worlds”, which may have dispatched
around half of all humans ever born.
But his book is more than a litany of vic-tims. Mr Winegard convincingly argues
that the insect has shaped human life as
well as delivering death. Mosquitoes
helped save the Romans from Hannibal
and Europe from the Mongols. And if ma-
laria has changed history, so has resistance
to it. Europeans believed that the relative
immunity enjoyed by some Africans made
them ideal slaves in the New World. Later,
the tables were turned. “They will fight well
at first, but soon they will fall sick and die
like flies,” predicted Toussaint Louverture
of the Frenchmen sent to end his slave rev-
olution in Haiti. He was right. About 85% of
the 65,000 soldiers deployed to the colony
died of mosquito-borne illnesses, and Hai-
ti won its independence.
These dashes across time and distance
could become exhausting, but Mr Wine-
gard is an engaging guide, especially when
he combines analysis with anecdote. One
highlight relays a bizarre plot by a Confed-
erate zealot to infect Abraham Lincoln with
yellow fever; another passage explains the
ancient Egyptian habit of fighting malarial
fevers by bathing in urine. (A few of the wit-
ticisms fall flat. Calling the 18th-century
Caribbean a “dinner-party buffet” for mos-
quitoes seems glib, for example; anthropo-
morphising the pests as a “guerrilla force”
is a metaphor too far.)
But much of Mr Winegard’s narrative is
thrilling—above all the concluding chap-
ters in which he tackles the modern mos-
quito. Drugs and insecticides have helped
slash malaria rates, but mosquitoes can
quickly develop immunity themselves. In
total, the insects still kill over 800,000 peo-
ple every year. And though gene-editing
might one day render them harmless, or
even obliterate them altogether, mosquito-
borne illnesses such as Zika have recently
been spreading to new regions. The de-
stroyer of worlds has not finished yet. 7Killer insectsThe itch of fate
The Mosquito. By Timothy Winegard.
Dutton Books; 496 pages; $28. Text
Publishing; £12.99Enemy number one